


Facilis Descensus Averno

by dawnsummers



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Coda, Dreams vs. Reality, Episode: s06e05 The Gospel of Josephine, F/M, Post-Season/Series 04 Finale, Season/Series 06, post apocalyptic domesticity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 05:32:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19222621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawnsummers/pseuds/dawnsummers
Summary: It's been just the three of them since Praimfaya, and Clarke can't get distracted. Not by dreams or nightmares, or all the people who aren't there. She needs to focus on what's real.





	Facilis Descensus Averno

Clarke wakes to light: the morning sun warm on her cheek.

For a moment she's disoriented, her heart racing with the last notes of some forgotten dream, but then there's the in and out of Madi's breathing next to her, and Clarke's eyes open to the bright red of the ceiling above them, a few messy strands of her little girl's hair tickling her chin, and the moment's gone. Madi sleeps quiet, her legs drawn into her chest, her little fingers holding fast to Clarke's sleeve. It's not early, and Clarke should wake her, maybe. Wrestle her into boots, take her fishing.

Instead, she smooths her daughter's hair back, eases her hand's grip on the fabric of Clarke’s shirt, slips out of bed. Her boots sit by the entrance of their little hut. Outside, Eden is blue and green and filled with birdsong, and–

Bellamy sits a few hundred feet from where she is, his broad back to her, and she can just hear the low rumble of his voice.

She blinks back the bright of the morning, and then, for some reason, blinks again. ( _Her heart skips, and then-_ ) She smiles. Makes her way over, and he turns towards the sound of leaves rustling underfoot.

"The fish are good, though," he’s telling the radio in his hand. "Madi caught one _this_ big, yesterday." He smiles at her, and her heart aches.

Bellamy's stopped shaving: his jaw is dark with scruff, and his hair curls over his ears. (She doesn’t want to run her fingers through it, not at all.) He's also wearing one less layer than usual, now that summer's hit them and life on Earth is closer to what Clarke had always imagined. He's easier, these days (less tension in the line of his jaw, less weariness in the set of his shoulders) than Clarke's ever seen him.

The radio's been silent since Praimfaya, but they haven't stopped calling.

"Octavia?" she asks, and he looks down and away, nods at his boots.

Reports, "Clarke's here," with his thumb pressed to the transmission button.

"Hey, Octavia."

 

+

 

Clarke’s seen movies about summer (movies about teenagers getting lifeguard jobs, growing up, having affairs with older men in Italy), and read about it, and daydreamed about it, too. The daydreams she had on the Arc: mostly useless and woefully lacking in war negotiations and bitter rationing and overall death. Influenced mainly by Earth Skills and sometimes, teenage rom-coms and old nature films.

Still, she kind of gets it now, the big thing about summer. Beauty, heat, bugs. It makes things feel more lazy.

It’s their second summer since Praimfaya, and things have settled into an easy routine. Wake up, eat (berries, leftovers) lessons, check traps, catch dinner, cook, clean, sleep. It leaves a lot of room for walks through the woods, and sketching, and sunbathing.

Clarke stretches her leg out, massaging the ache where Madi’s staff had hit her during their sparring, earlier. Looks at Bellamy, who’s sitting with Madi, helping her scratch broad letters into the dirt, but he’s already watching her.

 _Okay?_ He mouths, nodding at her leg.

 _Okay,_ she mouths back.

 

+

 

Madi’s a hunter, and when she wants to be, she can be almost quiet as a mouse, but the longer Clarke’s known her, the longer Eden’s failed to stop being safe, to suddenly stop being the one good spot on the Earth and try to swallow them whole, the louder she gets. She talks, in Trig, a mile a minute, and they feed the words back to her in English.

It’s probably the first time she’s been able to be loud, of course, because now there’s no flamekeepers to hear, and when these five years are over, well, maybe the combined power of a second nuclear holocaust and whatever Octavia’s doing to lead those people will be enough to change things.

Maybe. But if not, that’s why they train. That’s why they teach her to fight, and hide.

Right now, it’s the end of a long day, and Clarke is drowsy, but Madi’s got enough energy to compose her own campfire songs.

“ _El-e-phant,_ ” she’s speak singing, now. “I’d love to catch an Elephant.”

There aren’t any elephants left, of course. There must have been, in some part of the world, when they’d first come down, but they’re as mythical to Clarke now as they were when she’d read Arabian Nights for School. Bellamy, for some reason, had explained them as having ears like fans, and legs like tree trunks, and a nose like a hose, and also tusks.

“I wanna catch an Aardvark, I’m gonna catch a Baboon,” Madi continues, stretching the vowels out outrageously. Her accent makes the words sharp, her attitude makes them unrecognizably dramatic.

She trails off into a high note, stops, and smirks at Clarke and Bellamy, both leaning rather sleepily into the fire.

“Ai'm gonna homplei a pauna.”

Clarke’s laugh comes soft, but it comes. “Believe me. You don’t want to meet one.”

“Then tell me _another_ story.”

Clarke rests her head on her hand, and closes her eyes to the fire. It leaves light dancing on the inside of her eyelids.

“What kinda story do you want?” Bellamy asks.

 

+

 

“If you keep squirming, I’m going to have to cut it off.”

Madi huffs out a frustrated breath, rolls her eyes. (Two years ago, she would have met that threat with an elbow to the throat.) “I don’t like your braids.”

“I don’t like you getting your hair all tangled up in the trees.”

“Clarke has long hair, and she doesn’t braid it.”

Bellamy looks at Clarke, like, do you see what I put up with, and she tries not to laugh.

“Here,” she says, and grabs the brush out of Bellamy’s hand, pulls it through her hair a few times, gathers it all so it’s straight down her back, and sits next to Madi. Like, have at me.

There’s a second pause, and then Bellamy’s hand is on her scalp, pulling her hair—gently—into sections, and she’s staying perfectly still.

Madi screws her face up, quizzically, at the two of them. “Make it a french braid,” she says, finally. (Vindictively.)

 

+

 

“My dad was as big as a mountain,” Madi tells her, one afternoon at the stream. It’s a rare thing, for Madi to relay a recollection from Before. Clarke doesn’t know how much she remembers, or what it was like, beyond what’s obvious from the dangerous, quiet little naitblida she’d met. Something like Octavia’s life: people who loved her. People who told her she had to hide.

“Mine was, too,” she responds, after awhile.

 

+

 

They all have nightmares. They all have nightmares, and when Madi gets them Clarke holds her, and when Clarke gets them Madi holds her and when she’s loud, Bellamy brings her water. But sometimes she just lies awake and listens for his breathing, and sometimes she can hear that he’s awake, too, but she doesn’t crawl into his bed, and when he jerks awake, violent, she just brings him water.

 

+

 

“Bilaik won _woodpecker._ ” Bellamy has Madi on his shoulders. She squints ahead, to where he’s pointing.

“His name ste Mofi,” she says, and he laughs.

 

+

 

Clarke tells Madi stories, but Madi doesn’t always get the lesson of them, or whatever lesson Clarke thinks there’s supposed to be. Madi also thinks Emperor Augustus was pretty cool.

“What is space like?”

Bellamy snorts. “Big. Cold. Empty.”

“And the Arc?”

“Big, cold, crowded.”

 

+

 

Bellamy’s hands are shaking. Clarke’s the one who feels wrecked, middle school nervous and also old and broken beyond repair. Because it’s Bellamy, and touching someone like this–it’s never helped them, has it? Not Finn, not _Lexa._..

Bellamy’s hand is calloused, and warm, and big in hers, and he has a scar stretching from the bone of his wrist, all the way to the pad of his thumb. She brings it to her lips. Kisses it.

Tries to say, _it’s okay._

 

_+_

 

When Madi cries, Clarke holds her tight, and tells her _Everything will be alright,_ and _I won’t let anybody hurt you,_ and _You’re safe now.._

Things change fast on the ground. But something about loving someone this much makes Clarke bold with her promises.

 

+

 

“Do you think they fight, a lot?” she asks him.

Things she never asks: do you think they’re alive, do you think we’ll ever get them out, what do you think will happen? Those questions live in the space between them, and she knows he feels them. So she finds different ones.

“I think..” Bellamy’s mouth curves up lightly, and she sees another version of him in it. (A night weeks after they first met, alcohol buzzing in her stomach, his fucking smirk, the wave of _something_ she din't put a name to that had rolled through her at the sight of it.) “I think Murphy’s driving them all up the walls. I think Emori’s dumped him five times over now. And Raven’s probably sleeping with Echo.”

 

+

 

Clarke and Madi both bleed black, once a month. She really misses her implant.

 

+

 

“We hope you’re happy,” Madi tells the radio, in English that’s been perfect for years. “We all miss you, and we’re ready for you back.” She fidgets with the radio while she speaks, running her thumb over the curve of it, and then looks up at Clarke, like: _that’s good, isn’t it?_

In Madi’s green eyes, Clarke thinks she can see the whole of her own heart. She nods.

 

+

  

When summer turns again to fall, they go back to the bunker. Bellamy’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel the whole way there, and Madi’s a constant fountain of speech in the back, English turning to Trig and back again, waxing bored and curious and silly, while the landscape becomes ash outside the window, until they hit the ruins of Polis.

(Madi says it’s like a mountain made of bones. Clarke thinks, strangely, of a movie they’d had on the Arc, a movie she’d seen five times before she was twelve, and the Elephant Graveyard.)

 _Our people are buried here,_ she thinks but doesn’t say to Bellamy, because his sister is buried there and Clarke knows that nothing will mean anything if she is dead. (Her mother is buried there, and the way that twists in her gut is something she won’t put into words.) But while he’s standing there looking at that rubble, she can’t see his face, and for no reason she’s sharply and suddenly afraid.

Madi comes up behind them, her feet sliding through the sand, and Clarke takes her hand tight in her own, and Madi squirms a bit and then squeezes back.

(Later, much later, the feeling comes back to Clarke, and she thinks: _he looked like part of those ruins._ ) She thinks it with her head on his chest, and when he kisses her hair it’s gone again.

 

+

 

He’s moving inside her. All she can think, over and over, is  _I need you._

 

+

 

“How could you not know she’d win?”

You couldn’t spend five years with Bellamy Blake and not come out of it with some mythical conception of his sister, but then Clarke’s contributed to the whole thing too. With stories about Octavia’s heroism, about Lincoln and Trikru and the Conclave. Madi worships her, and it makes sense, but when Clarke thinks about opening that bunker, about what might come out….Well, of course she’d wonder. Of course she’d be worried.

She has these nightmares sometimes, that aren’t memories but feel like them. And they make the Earth feel off its axis.

 

+

 

They’ve been in Polis for ten days. They’re making progress, somehow.

 

+

 

Bellamy said, we need more power, and he’s been rigging something up to the Rover, piecing it together with determination and the combination of all their limited knowledge about everything. She thinks, five hundred times a day, _what if Raven were here?_

Of course, Raven’s not here. It’s always been just her and Bellamy, since Praimfaya. And, right now, they have to focus on the bunker.

 

+

 

Gaia says, “ ** _Clarke_** ,” but it’s just a dream.

 

+

 

“Come on, come on, come–” Bellamy’s jaw is tight, the rumble of the engine loud and sputtering, and somewhere a pebble shifts, loosens a boulder. The air feels charged around them, and then–

The engine suddenly cuts out, goes silent with one last rumble, and Clarke shoots forward in her seat, reaches out to grab the window, keep her head from flying into the windshield, but it does and bounces right off, unharmed, and there’s a voice coming from under her seat.

Yeah, there’s someone talking, someone not Madi (because Madi’s not with them, thank god) or Bellamy, and also a static-y voice getting louder and louder. She rummages for the radio. Finds it, grabs, it, holds it to her ear, because that voice...that _can’t_ be right…

“I’m sorry, can you repeat that last phrase?” Josephine is saying. “It sounds like, flashpa means flashback...so is it dream?”

Next to her, Bellamy's eyes are filled with horror.

“Who are you?” he says.

And then the sun goes out.

**Author's Note:**

> I just watched the third preview for 6x07 and I'm hollering this is like fucking Sherlock...actually though I'm pretty excited.
> 
> Bilaik won woodpecker=Look, a woodpecker!  
> His name ste Mofi=His name is murphy  
> Ai'm gonna homplei a pauna=I'm gonna hunt a gorilla


End file.
